No dab hand at dalliance

Friends of Aurelio Zen, Michael Dibdin's Venetian policeman, will be pleased to learn that he was not killed, as they might have supposed, when a bomb went off under his car in Sicily at the end of Blood Rain; whether they will still be as pleased when they've reached the end of this new book - a novella rather than a novel - is another matter.

And Then You Die opens on an Italian beach where Zen, under an assumed name, is convalescing from his injuries - severe concussion, two fractured ribs, collapsed lung, and several other broken bones - and flirting with Gemma, an attractive divorcee, who occupies a neighbouring sunlounger. He's still far from first base in the relationship when he's summoned to America to testify against two Mafia brothers. Due to an emergency, the flight puts down in Iceland, where, in the best episode of the book, Zen gets drunk, has hallucinatory visions of the huldufolk, the hidden people, and is given a hangover remedy even more repulsive than any concocted by Jeeves. It's made of hakarl: decomposed shark's meat pickled in raw alcohol. Back in Italy, he's promoted and given a sinecure; but, as he's reunited with Gemma, the book comes to a sudden and startling end.

Michael Dibdin is an outstanding crime novelist; the author of, besides the Aurelio Zen series, a number of brilliantly written, subtle and powerful narratives. But And Then You Die can hardly be numbered among his best. Although the occasional isolated passage shows him at somewhere near top form, the whole is a sad disappointment. The by-play between Zen and Gemma is gruesomely embarrassing: Dibdin is obviously no dab hand at dalliance. In the final chapter, a hastily written, careless explanation of events is shovelled at the reader with all the finesse of a stoker tending a furnace. And, on finishing the book, it is impossible to repress the feeling that both author and publisher have, quantitatively and qualitatively, somewhat cynically short-changed their customers.